Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Ilya admires the picture, feeling his cock twitch looking at the perfect abs in the picture in front of him. He starts to palm himself in his shorts, except… he knows those abs. He’s jerked off to those abs since he was a teenager, they are imprinted into his mind so strongly he would know them anywhere. Those are Shane Hollander’s abs. In fact, he's pretty sure that this exact picture is on a billboard two streets away.

Ilya decides that this guy is fun to talk to, even if he is, for some reason, pretending to be Shane Hollander. It's probably too late to meet up with someone in real life anyway, and he has a paper due soon for his masters. There's no harm in just chatting for a while, especially since imagining that he's having sex with Shane Hollander is basically what he does when he jerks off anyway.

Two months later

“Who are you talking to?” Sveta is looking at him with a raised eyebrow, at the delighted expression on Ilya’s face.

“Ah, I am talking to my catfish.” They're sitting on the sofa in Sveta's gross shared flat. One of her roommates has left three plates with a neon green substance stuck to them on the coffee table in front of them, and the whole place smells of cheap weed and bad decisions. Ilya had begged her to let them move in together, but she had refused to even entertain the idea, saying that they could either sleep together or live together but not both.

“What do you mean, your catfish?” Ilya angles the phone over so that Sveta can see the shirtless picture on the screen.

“This guy is pretending to be Shane Hollander on Grindr. It’s pretty funny. He’s cropped the face out, but his profile pic is from the billboard next to my apartment.” Sveta frowns.

"Why are you still talking to him if you know he’s catfishing you?" Ilya whips the phone away so that she can't scroll, and see that they've been talking every couple of days for the last two months.

“I just think it would be fun to go on that TV show, Catfish? So I am still talking to him.” It's his favourite show to watch hungover, even though every episode has exactly the same story. It's ridiculous, that these people can fall in love with someone when they don't even know who they're talking to.

“You’re talking to a guy because you want to get on TV?”

“It looks fun! And on the show they fly you to wherever the Catfish lives. Maybe he lives somewhere cool, like Florida or LA, and I get a free holiday." Wayne has said that he lives in Ottawa like Ilya, but obviously that's where Shane Hollander lives, so of course he would claim to live there. The real person behind the screen could be anywhere.

"It still seems like a bad reason to talk to him. He could be scamming you." Ilya rolls his eyes.

"He's not going to scam me. He's just a lonely, and probably ugly pervert. He's not even good at sexting, so he'd make a pretty bad scammer." It's actually kind of adorable, how bad he was in the beginning. Something about his eagerness combined with how much he seemed to want to do a good job of getting Ilya off was endearing, and a bit sexy.

"Ok, remind me again why you're talking to him?"

"He's kind of funny. And he's really good at finding hot pictures of Shane Hollander. Look at this, I don't even know where he got it, doesn't look like any of his PR stuff."

Ilya angles the screen so that Sveta can see a photo of Shane Hollander in a locker room wearing a tiny pair of briefs. It's one of the better images that Wayne has sent, one saved in the locked folder that Wayne requested he make.

“Whoa! I don’t think I’ve seen that one before. Maybe he did a shampoo commercial or something? It looks like the actual locker room." Sveta zooms in on the edge of the Centaurs logo painted on the wall behind him.

"Yeah, maybe he did a photo book at some point? You see now why Wayne is the best, I get to talk about all my Shane Hollander locker room fantasies with someone."

"Wow, now I can’t tell who is more pathetic. The guy pretending to be Shane Hollander, or the guy getting off on talking to fake Shane Hollander." Ilya playfully shoves her shoulder. He knew that this was going to be her reaction, which is why he'd put off telling her.

"Shut up, leave me and my catfish alone."

"Sure. By the way, what is fake Shane Hollander's name?" Ilya had hoped that she wasn't going to ask this.

Ilya sighs before he says it. "... Wayne. He said he works in sports administration."

"Wow, quitting hockey was supposed to make you smarter, but even with no concussions, you are still stupid."

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